In the exposition of the first moment of the judgment of taste, Kant argues that the satisfaction in the beautiful, or “favor,” is the only “free” satisfaction, because it alone is not determined by interests. Examination of what Kant means by “interest”—an element of his thought that has not been well understood—shows that, even if this argument is effective in application to the distinction between favor and the satisfaction in the good, it fails in application to the distinction between favor and the satisfaction in the agreeable. The thesis that favor is the only “free” satisfaction does not, however, depend essentially on the concept of interest; in fact, Kant's argument is strengthened by being reformulated without that concept.

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives, first advanced just over fifty years ago, has become part of the technical apparatus of philosophers. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. We argue that the latter way of understanding the notion yields both a more defensible version of Geach’s arguments that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are attributive and a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity.

According to Kant, the singular judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ is, or may be, aesthetic, while the general judgement ‘Roses in general are beautiful’ is not. What, then, is the logical relation between the two judgements? I argue that there is none, and that one cannot allow there to be any if one agrees with Kant that the judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ cannot be made on the basis of testimony. The appearance of a logical relation between the two judgements can, however, be explained in terms of what one does in making a judgement of taste. Finally, I describe an analogy between Kant’s treatment of judgements of taste and J. L. Austin’s treatment of explicit performative utterances, which I attribute to a deeper affinity between their respective projects.

Kant’s argument in § 38 of the Critique of Judgment is subject to a dilemma: if the subjective condition of cognition is the sufficient condition of the pleasure of taste, then every object of experience must produce that pleasure; if not, then the universal communicability of cognition does not entail the universal communicability of the pleasure. Kant’s use of an additional premise in § 21 may get him out of this difficulty, but the premises themselves hang in the air and have no independent plausibility. What Kant offers as a proof of our right to make judgments of taste is more charitably construed as an indirect argument for the adequacy of a speculative explanation of a presumed right to make judgments of taste.

There is a widely held view, due to the work of Jerome Stolnitz, that the concept of a distinctively aesthetic mode of perception, one defined by the characteristic of disinterestedness, originated with such writers as Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Archibald Alison. I argue through a detailed examination of the texts that this view is a complete misrepresentation. Those of the writers under discussion who employ the concept of disinterestedness (which not all of them do) do not give it the so-called “perceptual” meaning that Stolnitz does, and none of them use it to define a specifically “aesthetic” mode of perception, attention, pleasure, or anything else. The governing concept of their aesthetic thought was neither “disinterestedness” nor “the aesthetic” but (with the exception of Shaftesbury) “taste.” I conclude with an analysis of what the differences are, and why they matter.

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments. This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought. Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate. Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve.

Book reviews:

Matthew Hutson, The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane, in The American Rationalist 59.1 (Jan.–Feb. 2013): 11–12